Grab your bear can or camp chair, kick your feet up and chew the fat about anything Sierra Nevada related that doesn't quite fit in any of the other forums. Within reason, (and the HST rules and guidelines) this is also an anything goes forum. Tell stories, discuss wilderness issues, music, or whatever else the High Sierra stirs up in your mind.

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort.

University of Michigan psychology research in the December issue of Psychological Science explored the cognitive benefits of interacting with nature and found that walking in a park in any season, or even viewing pictures of nature, can help improve memory and attention.

I think this is stated what so many of us have noticed and why so many of us like to head for the hills. I believe the hyperstimulation of "civilization" has become worse with time and we are seeing the affects in students and in the professional workplace. Educators will talk about this constantly: why does the average student seem to have a much shorter attention span than say two decades ago--and this means students of all ages from K-12 through college. Many of us will come up with various ad hoc theories over a cup of coffee or over a pint of beer that have no basis in systematic scientific studies (I'm as guilty as the next person). In any case, I think that the outdoors are even more the antidote for civilization today than in the past.